Providence, R. I., 1839.
Dear Miss Lynch: I thank you for your kind invitation to visit you, with Mr. Furness. If I ever went anywhere, I certainly should have come. But for ten years past I have made no visits and formed no new acquaintance. I am considered a very odd woman; but my only oddity consists in an unaffected love of seclusion. I have not the smallest particle of social ambition. I would not take the trouble to go to two parties for the sake of obtaining the most flattering honors society could confer. It would, in fact, be taking what I do not want; for I have the most sincere aversion to being conspicuous in any way. To this natural love of keeping out of sight, is added weariness of spirit. Life has been to me a hard battle, and I would fain rest by the wayside. I am careful to do injury to no one, by act or word; and I strive to do, in a noiseless way, as much good as my limited means will allow. From what I am told of your independent character, I think you will admit that I have an undoubted right to live in retirement, since the choice springs from no imagined superiority and no deficiency of kindly social feelings.
The world has tried hard to fasten its fetters somehow upon me, but it is quite as much to the purpose to pour water on a duck’s back. I wish well to everybody; I delight in beauty wherever I meet it; I am thankful I am poor; and I do not want a single thing that the world can either give or take away. With the most cordial wishes for your happiness, I am truly your friend,
Lydia Maria Child.
Luise
November 15th, 2009 at 8:40 am
How old was Child when she wrote this, and how much longer did she live. She sounds at peace.
Momeester
November 15th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Is this from the abolitionist Lydia Marie Child?
your beeeeegest fan
November 15th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Would it be weird if I posted this as my Facebook status?
Momeester
November 17th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
‘I have made no visits and formed no new acquaintance.” I love this bit , it is so Austen…”I send no greetings to your mother.”
So Mary, I do not think it weird if you post this for your status. It seems so early 19th century.
Nora
November 19th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Child (who was indeed the abolitionist Lydia Marie Child, mom) was born in Medford, MA in 1802. So, in 1839, she’d have been thirty-seven.
I was surprised to learn, after reading this letter, that she was married when she wrote it, and had been for eleven years. She sounds so stalwart and alone! But according to the American National Biography, she had every reason to trust in her own self-sufficiency:
At the height of her popularity she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), which called for immediate emancipation (without compensation to owners) and racial equality as well as argued against colonization in Africa. . . Child was almost immediately ostracized by a public that formerly had adored her.
She and her husband had never been rich, and their poverty was compounded by this ostracization and by her husband’s attempts to “raise sugar beets as an alternative to slave-produced sugarcane” which proved “a dismal failure.”
In the 1840s, Childs legally separated her finances from her husbands’. The American National Biography doesn’t give much other detail about their personal lives during this decade, but notes that, “following an estrangement of nearly a decade, the Childs had permanently reconciled by 1852.”
Whether or not she ever visited with Miss Lynch is another question. Miss Lynch turns out to have been Anne Lynch Botta, who went on to run a well-known literary salon in Rhode Island that, by 1943, would be considered “the very best literary society of Providence.” Years later, Botta would move to New York, where she would introduce a young Edgar Allen Poe into literary society.
And, um, I should get back to working on my paper for Information and Society now. All the quotations I pulled for this comment are from the American National Biography, which, if you’re lucky, can be found at your local library.
salocin
November 27th, 2009 at 2:31 am
Thanks for sharing.
Question: is this ‘Social and Cultural History database’ online?
If you would be so kind as to e-mail me in response…
Sincerely, S
Momeester
November 30th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
putting T’giving books away today I realize she wrote “over the river and through the woods.’ Not bad for a recluse.